Intern Corner 07 – Barni Sparkes

In this blog post I will go over a basic summary of what I have done, because most of the details have been mentioned previously.

I knew that the plan for the session was to meet Lauren and her associate Huw Morgan, who has composed pieces that are played in the Organ and Electronics tour. I saw this as a chance to show Huw what I have done to his piece and also to get his opinion on it, so I am sure that he is happy with how it will sound for the final CD release. I also wanted to use this opportunity to get a more detailed insight to the concept and process of his piece ‘Unseeing Red Eye at the Lungs Heart’.

First of all we had a chance to listen through his composition, and I was glad to hear that Huw was really happy with the outcome. Also to add to this Huw suggested we listen through Michael Bonaventure’s piece ‘Rearmost Odd’ as he had previously had a conversation with him about it. From this Huw suggested how I can change the piece to suit how Michael would like it to sound. Huw also kindly gave me a detailed insight to the process of creating his aforementioned composition, this helped me greatly when thinking of how I am going to go about composing my piece for Lauren.

Huw also lent me his ears as I wanted to run my concept for my composition for Lauren by him (as I explained in my last post). Huw was very enthusiastic about my idea and helped me towards the thought that regarding the actual organ part of the piece, that I think I will have some sort of instructions for Lauren to follow when reciting, but there will be a lot of room for improvisation on her part. Huw also helped me understand what exactly is possible when composing for a organ as well, for example the different types of stops you may use and so on.

The next plan for the day was to go into the university’s chapel and record the ambience of the room, this being for the concept for my composition. For this recording I used the university’s Soundfield DSF-2 microphone, which I found to be very good, and very sensitive to the ambience of the room, which is what I was looking for. I also added my own portable recorder, which is a Olympus LS-14 to the other side of the room, facing the DSF-2 so they were both capturing the centre. You can see from the picture that the DSF-2 is running into a MOTU interface, and then recorded straight onto my mac.

To finish the day off, Lauren and I had a chance to listen through the other compositions I had gotten ready for the time being. This included about 8 other pieces, some of them with different recordings from different concerts, so we were sure we knew what ones to go with so I can work on them in the following weeks. On that note, over the next couple of weeks I am going to send each composer a version of their piece, so I am comfortable with knowing that they are happy with that I have done with it so far.

The weeks following I am hopefully going to meeting up with Matthew Wright and Panos Ghikas who are both lecturers at the university. Meeting up with them will help me greatly in fleshing out my ideas for my concept.